What has gone wrong with our English?

What has gone wrong with our English?
Josh Fishy | 11/23/2015

The Philippines is considered one of the largest English-speaking countries in the world.  This means that a great number of its people can converse this foreign language a cut above their fellow Asians and other nationals outside the region. To some extent, however, Filipinos’ edge over other countries with regard to fluency in using the language is little by little dying away.


It’s clear as day that Filipinos today can’t spontaneously express themselves in English. As a matter of fact, lots of college graduates and even professionals at that don’t have a good command in English so that they have to mix this language and Filipino when putting themselves across.

To find out what has gone wrong with our English, we make a list of some reasons why one of these days countries we are teaching how to speak the language well would have been the ones tutoring us the tongue we were once so good at.
  1. Students nowadays almost never read good books. Gone are the days when students find time to spend reading books. This probably all started on the onset of information age. Though this period began around the 70s, Filipinos started to come face to face with modern technology such as the computer in the later part of 1990s.

  2. A lot of Filipino or Tagalog is shown on TV. Even Hollywood films are dubbed in Tagalog so that one who has no idea about dubbing would dissolve into laughter after seeing a no-Filipino-looking guy so articulate in this dialect. If making the Film comprehensible to every Filipino is the reason why English movies are dubbed, then by doing so TV stations may be under the impression that their audience are dull-witted to make any sense of whatever English is said by the characters.

  3. English as the medium of instruction in public schools is not carried through seriously. More often than not, English teachers are held accountable for whatever mistake in grammar or pronunciation a student makes. This responsibility, however, should not be shouldered by English teachers alone. Instead, every teacher be it the one who teaches Mathematics or Science should be the source of good English for learners.

  4. More than half of today’s students are not quite fascinated to learning this foreign language. No matter how good a teacher is in teaching this language, everything still depends on the recipient. If a student wants to be proficient in something else rather than learning English, then there’s nothing a teacher can do about him.

  5. Students face the dilemma as to what language should be used and mastered. As a people that endeavor to maintain their culture or their language in particular as well as making themselves proficient in English as the second language, Filipinos are finding it hard to be good at two or three different languages one and the same time.

  6. The lion’s share of today’s students’ free time is spent on social media. Things would have been different if what students do on the internet is something worthwhile. But posting and sharing their photos on Facebook won’t make their communication skills any better, not unless they use English as the medium to put their ideas into written words.

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